|
by
kirupa | 16 August 2010
Have questions? Discuss this Flash tutorial
with others on the forums.
In the
previous
page, you set properties to define what your shape will
look like when drawn. There are a handful of properties you
can still set on a shape after it has been created, though.
In this page, we'll look at them.
Before describing how to change properties on an already
drawn shape, let's talk about how to select a shape first. By default, a typical
(non-primitive) rectangle, oval, or polystar shape is made
up of the body and the stroke.
The body is usually the large part of your shape:
The stroke is the outside edge surrounding the body:
If you click inside your shape, you’ll only
be selecting the body. If you click the edges,
you’ll only be selecting the
stroke.
To select your entire shape, double click on your shape
(edge or body) or do a range selection where your selection
box fully engulfs (like a
fangorious monster) your shape:
I know discussing selection may sound trivial, but Flash
is one of the few tools that allows you to select subparts
of a shape in this manner this. Business as usual where
selecting any part of the shape selects everything related
to it simply won’t work. This is extra important if you are
planning on changing your shape's properties, because the
properties you see are based entirely on what you have
selected on the artboard.
When you select a shape, there are a
few properties that are common to all of them. To view the
properties, make sure your Properties panel is displayed and
fully (stroke + body) select a shape:
[ your shape's generic properties ]
You can adjust size, position, and other boring things
better suited to editing on the artboard itself. What is
important is being able to specify fill and stroke (outline)
color of your shape and the size/style of your stroke. Much
of this should be self-explanatory, so I won’t delve too
deeply into this.
One cool property is being able to set your stroke style.
The stroke style drop-down allows you to pick from a series
of styles that affect what your stroke actually looks like:
[ select a Stroke style easily ]
If you aren’t happy with the built-in styles, you can
define your own by clicking the pencil icon found to the
right of the drop-down.
Ok, this wraps
up our coverage of how to draw shapes. As you can see,
creating a simple shape is extremely easy using Flash, and
understanding what the various properties do can help you
easily create more complicated shapes that are bound to come
up in your designs at some point.
Just a final word before we wrap up. If you have a question and/or want to be part of a friendly, collaborative community of over 220k other developers like yourself, post on the forums for a quick response!
|
Drawing Shapes in Flash - Page 3
